Pakistan goes against grain with coal power

Beijing provides billions

ISLAMKOT, Pakistan, Nov 19, (Agencies): In Pakistan’s bleak Thar desert, the roar of trucks is constant at a massive Chinese-backed coal power project the government sees as an answer to chronic energy shortages, but which activists warn is an environmental disaster.

Machines are running round the clock to finish the mine and coal power plant, a flagship project of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) plan that has seen Beijing provide billions of dollars in financing to its southwestern neighbour.

Much of it is for infrastructure and power in a country where blackouts have infuriated citizens and hamstrung the economy for years.

And while coal is going out of vogue in most other parts of the world because of its environmental impact, it will fuel nine of the 17 proposed CPEC power plants.

The one in Thar in southern Sindh province sits atop 175 billion tonnes of coal – one of the largest deposits in the world. Discovered in 1992, it has remained unexploited until now, but is expected to yield 3.8 million tonnes a year when fully operational.

A few kilometres away, towering chimneys emerge from the sand dunes as Pakistani and Chinese workers toil away on a 660-megawatt power plant which will burn coal from the mine.

After struggling for years to upgrade its power infrastructure, Pakistani leaders have touted CPEC as a “game changer” that will help lift the ailing economy, dismissing concerns that Chinese financing will lead to unsustainable debts and that the projects are boosting Beijing’s interests at Islamabad’s expense.

“We are five months ahead of schedule,” said Shams Shaikh, director-general of the Sindh Engro Coal Mining Company (SECMC), a joint China-Pakistan venture that has invested around 1.7 billion euros ($1.9 billion) in the Thar mine-and-plant project.

Experts say the site should be able to produce 200,000 MW of electricity over the next hundred years – a boon for the energy-starved country where demand increases by eight percent each year, according to official statistics.

Despite the fanfare and government assurances, the project has triggered concern about its impact on the environment.

The type of coal in Thar is lignite, notorious for its poor energy efficiency and high carbon dioxide emissions.

Project officials insist its operations will comply with national and international environmental laws.

But mining coal and burning it for power are waterintensive activities, and villagers in this impoverished, vast stretch of desert say the project is playing havoc with local supplies.

Underground rivers which previously flowed into the mine have been diverted, and residents of Gorano, a small village some 25 kilometres (15 miles) from the coal project, claim their pastures have been transformed into a salt lake due to water diversions and the dumping of waste. “It’s complete chaos,” said Raja who goes by one name, while another local, Yameen Bhatti, added: “The (diverted) water has attracted mosquitoes, which spread diseases.”

SECMC says it has given 950 million rupees ($7 million) to the community as compensation, but after the floodwaters recede, experts warn the residents will probably continue to struggle as the thirsty power project will consume a huge amount of ground water.

Environmental concerns about Pakistan’s coal spree go beyond the villages of Thar. The UN has warned that the country risks an “absolute” water shortage by 2025, and activists have warned about the impact of such industries on increasingly scarce water supplies.

Officials have said that the country’s new coal plants will use the most efficient technology available to minimise pollution.

Pakistan’s push to build coal-fired plants comes amid a global drive to replace fossil fuels with renewable energy like solar and wind. “While the rest of the world is abandoning coal, we are throwing ourselves into this disaster,” said Omar Cheema, an environmental expert.

Some experts and officials have also suggested it would be cheaper to invest in renewables as the price of solar and wind is dropping, and several international studies have also shown that coal is no longer competitive.

Irfan Yousuf, director of renewables at the Ministry of Energy, estimated the per-kilowatt price of solar power at 4.8 rupees, compared with 8.5 rupees for coal.

Shaikh

Trump team plans coal sideshow:

The Trump administration plans to set up a side-event promoting fossil fuels at the annual UN climate talks next month, repeating a strategy that infuriated global-warming activists during last year’s talks, according to three people with knowledge of the matter.

As with the 2017 gathering in Bonn, Germany, the administration plans to highlight the benefits of technologies that more efficiently burn fuels including coal, the sources said.

This year’s talks in Katowice, Poland – located in a mining region that is among the most polluted in Europe – are intended to hammer out a rule book to the 2015 Paris agreement on climate change, which set a sweeping goal of ending the fossil-fuel era this century by spurring a trillion-dollar transition to cleaner energy sources such as solar and wind power.

Even as the Trump administration aims to promote energy strategies that could detract from those international goals, it also plans to let State Department officials continue negotiating the climate accord – a recognition that the next US president may drop the nation’s opposition to the pact.

“The White House seems to have taken the view that it’s important to let technocrats complete the work of the rule book. It’s in the US national interest to be at the table and see an outcome that emphasizes transparency, holds countries accountable,” said one of the sources, who is familiar with State Department plans.

The White House and the State Department did not respond to requests for comment.

The United States, the world’s top oil and gas producer, is the only country to have announced its intention to formally withdraw from the Paris accord.

The administration’s resistance has come against a backdrop of increasingly urgent warnings from scientists about the threats posed by greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels. The panel will come less than two months after the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned in a report that the world’s use of coal for generating power will need to be nearly eliminated by mid-century – to between 1 and 7 percent of the global mix, from around 40 percent now – to help prevent deadly droughts, storms and floods brought on by climate change.